In 1948, the Central Committee of the Romanian Workers' Party began to question the nature of the flood of new Party members who swelled the ranks after August 23, 1944.¹

In November 1948 the first steps were taken to organize the Comisiunea Centrală de Verificare—the Central Commission for Verification. Between November 1948 and May 1950 about 200,000 investigators worked to eliminate “‘careerist and opportunist' elements which threatened to sabotage the proletarian section of the party, as the result of [earlier, uncontrolled] mass admittance.”² By October 31, 1949 there were fifty-five county-level commissions—four in Bucharest—and 772 subcommissions in place to “verify” existing and newly applying Party members and review new applicants.³ By the time the initial results of the verification process were announced in June 1950, 192,000 members—more than twnety percent of the total membership—had been purged from the Party.⁴ Kenneth Jowitt suggests that the process of verification had a dual purpose for the Romanian state.⁵ First, it was used as a means of binding the bureaucracy to then-Party leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej's own personal power. Second, verifications were meant to “increase institutional coherence” among Party members by separating “loyal” members from “opportunists.” These huge purges led to dramatic fluctuations in the Party ranks between the end of the Second World War and the mid-1950s: membership increased from less than 1,000 prior to the end of the War, to almost 1,000,000 by the late 1940s, then dropped to approximately 540,000 by 1955.⁶

The process of verification included: showing that one had actively taken “courses” in communist history and theory; writing out a constatare composed of an overview of one's education, work history, class status (before and after 1944), as well as similar information on one's extended family; the gathering, by both the committee and the applicant, of references (referinţe) and declarations (declaraţi) to evaluate the applicant; a background check and a meeting in front of a verification subcommission to determine the worth of the aspirant's application; and the submission of an autobiography.⁷

There was an immediate, double dynamic to the process itself. On the one hand, it represented a thoroughgoing, extensive exercise of bureaucratic power to audit Party membership; on the other hand, verification entailed a startlingly intimate, intensive examination of the public and private life of each member. Details of the life of the Party member—both the aspirant's mind and body—were laid bare by the bureaucratic exercise. What is more, the ideological rhetoric of “autocritique” demanded the member's active participation in this potentially confusing and traumatizing procedure.

In 1950s Romania, the difficulties of maintaining a sense of continuity between one's industrial working-class past and one's current political commitment to the Party were exacerbated by the failure of the Party to gain massive popular support in regions that had, ironically, been centers of labor resistance and labor organizing going back to the turn of the century. The Jiu Valley, a coal mining region in Romania, was one of those areas. Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, the Jiu Valley was sparsely populated due to its rough, mountainous terrain and unsuitability for agriculture. The first, limited surface mining of coal began there in 1840, but it was after the 1859 opening of the Petrila mine that the first major flow of capital and people began to enter the Jiu Valley. Strikes and labor resistance soon followed, beginning in 1875, with the first general strike in the region coming in 1892.⁸

The truly mythical importance of the miners of the Jiu Valley can be traced back to the interwar period when the region was the site of a growing union presence,⁹ constant strikes, and labor unrest (nineteen strikes took place between 1924 and 1928 alone¹⁰) in response to the global economic crisis that led to pay cuts and layoffs throughout the region.¹¹ Most notable of these events occurred in the town of Lupeni in August 1929 when police and gendarmes opened fire on a crowd of striking miners, killing thirty and injuring over one hundred.¹² This event, which became known as “Lupeni '29,”was glorified during the state socialist period with statues, songs, and even an award-winning film.

Because of this history of labor uprisings and even nascent socialist organizing, it surprised many in the Party that the Jiu Valley proved to be so difficult to bring into the Party's fold. Through the 1950s, local Party files documented frequent reports of public resistance among those workers who should have been most receptive to the changes in power. This “resistance” took many forms, including anti-Soviet graffiti such as “Long live hunger!” (Traiasca foametea—a play on the slogans “Long live the Party,” “Long live peace,” “Long live the Romanian Peoples' Republic,” etc.);¹³

frequently reported sabotage of mines, coal processing plants, and local industrial plants; and innumerable acts of everyday, petty resistance like hiding sheep from Party census-takers,¹⁴ stealing chairs from the local State Bank,¹⁵ and other small “crimes” against the state. This continued unrest kept the regional verificare subcommittee in Petroşani busy. With only three “comrades” working in this subcommittee, it was stretched thin, but still remained “vigilant” enough to refuse verification to 36.7% of the 955 applicants seen through 1954.¹⁶

Given the highly bureaucratized process of verification, many Party aspirants struggled against potentially unfavorable readings of documents and statements gathered by the verificare subcommittees. People frequently feared that their names might appear on the list of participants at some pre-1944 political function, and that this could lead to them being marked as politically suspect. Even working as a civil servant for the former governments could result in suspicion of collusion with the fascist Iron Guard or one of Romania's “historical” parties. In view of the overwhelming feeling of fear in the face of unknown documents and statements, it is little wonder that aspirants viewed the autobiography as the most important medium for the presentation of self to the Party. The autobiography provided the chance to project one's own image in one's own terms in an attempt to influence the verification subcommittee's evaluation of the applicant. If one could craft a life history in accord with the politics of the time, one might be able to address any obvious or subtle failings in one's class background, military service, or pre-1944 political affiliation.

Igal Halfin's recent work on autobiographies written for the Party in the early years of the Soviet Union provides a useful frame here.¹⁷

Halfin suggests that one can find a certain “master narrative” of a “conversion” story underlying the writing of these Party autobiographies. This, he believes, can be traced to the prevalence among applicants of special knowledge about the Manichean qualities of the Soviet worldview as well as their knowledge of the Soviet “New Man” project. One of the dangers, however, of uncritically transplanting Halfin's account of the Soviet Party narrative to Romanian Stalinism, is that during this period there was a real dearth of knowledge about what the Party expected from “regular people.” By the period in the 1920s that Halfin considers, Soviet society was saturated with a narrative richness that made certain self-presentations almost overdetermined. In 1950s Romania, however, contradictory messages, especially surrounding the place of the small industrial working class, made the writing of a Party autobiography fraught with hazards. A “rational-actor” view of the Party aspirant like Halfin's, one that assumes a near-perfect knowledge of both one's self and the desires of the Party, fails to account for the uncertainty and negotiated nature of the early years of Party rule in Eastern Europe. I argue in this paper that the autobiographies mandated by the verificare prompted a performance of one's self that reflected this imperfect knowledge through both the furtive and confessional nature of these self-presentations. The writing of these Party autobiographies, I argue, ultimately illuminates everyday understandings of the state that might not seem apparent in a more literal reading of the macro-level, internal politics of 1950s Romania. It is in the messy “working-through” of one's self-presentation that we can catch a glimpse of the ways in which the Party-state was experienced by many “regular,” working class Romanians.

The historiography of the self under Communism has tended to portray the author of the Party autobiography in economistic terms, as a rational actor with perfect knowledge of self and a perfect understanding of the desires of the state, not to mention an understanding of the knowledge that the state has of the author. Each moment in an autobiography is assumed to reflect an expertly crafted self which, in turn, reflects the ideological underpinnings of whatever iteration of the Party was then current. While this view of the rational author is perhaps somewhat overstated in the rush to render a useful prototype for the Party autobiography, individuals under state socialism were not without some normative guidance in their writing. Scholars have stressed the “master narrative” that was provided by the Party through propaganda about what the self should look like. One should have a “clean” past but, at the same time, one should be able to narrate a “conversion” story that illustrates when and how one achieved class consciousness.¹⁸

One should confess everything to the Party while, at the same time, recognizing the bureaucratic constraints under which the Party worked.¹⁹ One should be heroic but never self-serving. One should be rational and present the self with a flattened affect.²⁰

At the same time that there was this performative component of the autobiographical narrative, it is also important to stress the furtive nature of this self-presentation. The furtive self-presentation simultaneously reveals and conceals. It reveals that which one must show of the self as well as that which is impossible or dangerous to conceal. It conceals that which one might be able to underelaborate or some part of one's life where the narrative meaning is ambiguous enough to be presented in ways most favorable to the Party aspirant.²¹

This furtiveness is, I suggest, a function of the everyday experience of uncertainty that faced workers in 1950s Romania who attempted to present themselves as both always-already proletarian while simultaneously constructing a narrative of “personal transformation” toward becoming proletarian. The dual demands on the aspirant to Party membership were, of course, well grounded in the dual demands of “critique” (expressing one's self through explicit challenges to bourgeois injustice and, later, state socialist inefficiency and corruption) and the demands of “autocritique” (confessing one's own failings and the necessity of perpetual self-improvement). Indeed, bureaucratically, autocritique is seen as one of the means of revealing the hidden, true motivations of a Party aspirant. It is assumed that the furtive self-presentation of the “impure” opportunist will reveal itself during the process of applying for Party membership. However, even the language of autocritique could be learned and feigned, contributing layers to the furtive self-presentation.

In the purges in 1950s Romania, the Party demanded the destruction of the old and the creation of the new in political and economic life. Their project, however, did not end with the institutions of state and society, but also extended into a dream of recreating and revolutionizing the self. The New Man under state socialism was envisioned as the embodiment of a transition, the endpoint of a dialectic that resolved and ultimately erased the bourgeois past. This New Man would erase both the ignorance and backwardness of the peasantry as well as the dangerous arrogance and power of the bourgeoisie. The industrial working class, however, found itself in a curious position because it frequently viewed itself as always-already embodying many of the ideals of this New Man. I use the narrative struggle found in autobiographies from the purges, then, to reveal the everyday knowledge through which industrial working-class people negotiated their self-presentations to the Party and the state. The trick for the working-class Party aspirant, was to illustrate the transformation of the self—a conversion narrative—when, in fact, any reading of the broad outline of a working class person's life story would reveal continuity with, rather than a dramatic break or transformation from, the past.

Yet, while the proletarian self was under review, the unmasking of the opportunist being profoundly attached to one's “inner true” self, it was the body (i.e. external actions, behavior, life experiences) that had to be narrated in one's autobiography. It was the body that was implicated in the network of documents and statements that composed one's file (dosar). One might attempt to explain why one had been on the list of contributors to the local Iron Guard before 1944, but this explanation could be dismissed if the body could be fixed in the documents. Narrating the self through the body, then, became central in the attempt to wrest some feeling of agency in one's self-presentation to the Party. Still, the place of the body in Party ideology was anything but unambiguous. The narration of the body held a dual role in the eyes of the Party: first, as the marker of one's abject identity as proletarian when narrating the self under the former bourgeois regime; and, second, as lacking this iconic quality—indeed, as carrying an untrustworthy and potentially covert quality—when narrating personal events that took place after 1944. In the post-1944 period, the body becomes disconnected from the self, its authenticity and meaning viewed as suspect. The body becomes the site of ambiguity, of “just going through the motions.” Thus, when a shift leader in the Jiu Valley failed to meet the coal extraction quotas set by the plan, it was his bodily actions that were unambiguously read as a marker of his lack of vigilance and questionable class consciousness. His failure to work hard enough to reach the plan was not treated as ambiguous; the fault could lie with his failing health, the resistance of his work unit, the fact that he did not received a sufficient number of workers or the necessary materials for achieving the required number of tons per day, or infrastructural bottlenecks. Rather, the bodily failure was a marker, symptom, or reflection of a deeper problem in the self.

The 1953 autobiography of Iosif Nicolae²²

illustrates the challenges facing working-class people during this tense period. I will stress how Nicolae had to narrativize his life in the contradictory terms provided by the Party. He first presents himself as having a transcendental, always-already proletarian consciousness, and then attempts to construct a “conversion narrative” to account for his proletarian consciousness that belies the transcendental nature of this consciousness. In response to these challenges, Nicolae ultimately stresses his role as a martyr for the Party by attempting to inscribe his class consciousness on his body. He narrates his life story through moments of abuse by various employers when he was a youth and, later (between 1938–1944), through a more sophisticated and brutal inscription of bourgeois atrocities when he is jailed and tortured for his role in a nascent Communist political cell. Nicolae, however, seems incapable of dealing with the challenge of narrativizing his conversion to working-class consciousness. Despite his seemingly impeccable pre-1944 political pedigree, this lack of a confessional conversion rhetoric in his life story ultimately contributed to his problems achieving Party membership during the peak of Romania's verificare process. In particular, Nicolae's autobiography shows the disparity between the aspirant's view of what should be contained in one's self-presentation and the Party's view of the ideal candidate. Nicolae, in the telling of his story, assumes a simple transparency in the relations between the suffering of his body and the nature of his soul that, as I have suggested above, was highly problematic and anything but transparent in the eyes of the Party.

Iosif Nicolae was born in 1915 in the city of Petroşani (the administrative center and largest of the towns of the Jiu Valley region). His father worked in the coal mines in Petroşani, but died in 1919. His mother, a housewife, died in 1920, leaving him orphaned at an early age. He was the youngest of seven brothers, four of whom died when they were very young. His other two brothers, Gheorghe (the eldest) and Ioan, were significantly older than Nicolae. Gheorghe, after becoming an agent for a tobacco company in Satu Mare and then serving in the military, returned home in 1918 to take a job at the mine. In 1927, after “having serious intentions to marry and being refused,” he committed suicide by “putting his head under the wheels of a train.” By that time, Iosif Nicolae was in the first of many transient stages in his life, having been sent to his maternal aunt's home in Baia Mare. He began to go to primary school and to apprentice under his uncle's brother, a baker. In 1927, however, the same year in which his eldest brother killed himself, his aunt's husband died. She soon remarried, but her new husband proved to be especially cruel and abusive to young Nicolae, “terrorizing” him and, in December 1929, he demanded that Ioan, Nicolae's only remaining brother, take him back to Petroşani, where he was again apprenticed to a baker. In 1930, his brother Ioan left with a group of 600 miners from the Jiu Valley to work in the coal mines of France. The baker to whom Nicolae was apprenticed soon turned cruel, “ignorant, and swinelike” and began to beat him regularly until Nicolae left him.

Following this, Iosif Nicolae moved between different jobs and locations. He worked as a messenger at the Hotel Bucureşti in Petroşani, as a messenger and “advertiser” for a local cinema, then, in 1932, he worked as a vagonatar (transporting coal from the mine shaft). Feeling underpaid and having trouble surviving on the wages of a vagonatar, he left Petroşani in 1933 and went to Tîrgiu Jiu where he worked first as a clerk for a shopkeeper and then at a local bakery, leaving when the owner of the bakery was no longer able to pay his salary. He returned to Petroşani in December 1933 and was hired by a local Hungarian theatre owner in February 1934. Nicolae, though being hired merely as a messenger and scenery and sign painter, showed some talent as an actor and found himself on stage. The acting troupe, however, went on vacation in July 1934, so he was again without a job. After a few months he found himself in Cluj working in another theatre which specialized in operettas, again leaving when the owner could not pay him. In Aiud he joined a traveling theatre troupe, eventually leaving them when he was offered a position as an assistant at a “School of Choreography” in Dej where he stayed from December 1934 until April 1937, when he left to do his military service. After leaving the military, he returned to the Jiu Valley to work in a series of industrial jobs including a return to being a vagonatar, again leaving after nine months to work with his brother Ioan as a “tunneler” in Predeal. Ioan, however, left to work in Hungary in January 1940, and Nicolae returned to the Jiu Valley town of Vulcan working as a vagonatar, spent another two months in the army, and returned to the Jiu Valley as a vagonatar in the mines in Lupeni.

Nicolae's narrative to this point reads like a curriculum vitae of a traditional, poor industrial worker in interwar Romania, moving from town to town and industry to industry, picking up whatever work he can in the shadows of depression-era economic ruin. However, at this point in his autobiography, seemingly out of nowhere and at the end of a paragraph in which he has simply run through a series of jobs, locations, and dates, he suddenly states:

The sudden transition in his self-presentation from a fairly predictable and representative litany of hardship during the interwar period to a dramatic and politically-charged assertion of his active engagement in pre-1944 labor resistance is the first of several indications of the problem that Nicolae is facing in creating a sense of coherence between his early life story and (as we shall see) that of his later self-presentation as an active, pro-Communist conspirator and martyr for the Party.

In 1938, after his release from the army, Nicolae had met Dimitru M. while working in Vulcan. Dimitru M. was an active supporter of the “workers' movement” and was a “sympathizer of the Communist Party of the USSR.” In 1939–40 Nicolae, along with Dimitru M. and several others, actively participated in founding a local communist cell, conducting “conspiratorial meetings,” and writing and dispensing Party propaganda throughout the Jiu Valley. Iosif Nicolae was sent to about a dozen public meetings of the “fascist Legionnaires” in order to gather information from inside the organization. This cell was involved in organizing and agitating for a general strike in the Jiu Valley which took place from April 26 to May 2 or May 3, 1941. Sometime after this, Nicolae had gone to the Lupeni mine and tried to agitate among the workers for another strike. When he arrived on May 11, 1941, at 9:30 in the morning, he was arrested and so began his story of suffering at the hands of the siguranţa, the Romanian secret police under the fascists.

Nicolae found himself in jail with many others who had been involved in the local cell. It is at this point that we begin to see the slippery and uncertain nature of the body and “inner” self in his narrative. He recounts the attempts by the jailed cell members to determine how they had all been arrested and who had betrayed them to the police. The fine line between the conspirator's bodily actions—the apparently trustworthy comrade—and the conspirator's treacherous soul become central themes not only in Nicolae's attempt to determine the traitor in their midst but also in Nicolae's firsthand experience of the methods used by state authorities to “convert” someone into a traitor. Nicolae recounts how:

Two days later, they brought Nicolae back in for questioning and the torture began again when he refused to answer their questions:

A few days later, he was again offered the chance to become a police informant for the police, but again he refused. Finally, after two more days of torture, they transferred Nicolae to a military prison in Sibiu, saying that he was lucky to be “getting out with [his] life.” His trial was postponed several times due to the war, but eventually on the testimony of Ion O. he was found guilty of belonging to a “communist cell” and was sentenced to seven years in prison. For the next several days Nicolae was transferred around the country to different prisons: Sibiu, Alba Iulia, Deva, Arad, and Carausebeş. During this time he also learned that Dimitru M. had been sentenced to twenty to twenty-five years in prison.

When Nicolae finally arrived at the prison in Carausebeş, he was “greeted very warmly” by a whole host of notable figures in Romanian Party politics: Stoica Chivu, Lăzar Grünberg, Emil Bodnăraş, Miron Constantinescu, and, most significantly, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. During the Second World War Carausebeş was the mythical breeding ground of the Party leadership that would seize power in the years to follow.²³

In Carausebeş Nicolae helped the Party members in the prison by being involved in organizational meetings, recruitment, and in dispersing and acquiring vital food and other goods for the prisoners. Here, he recounts, he learned from “Comrade Gheorghiu-Dej” that the prison struggle would only be won by the achievements of the collective, whether accomplished “alone or in the collective.” In May 1942, Nicolae was transferred to a prison in Lugoj along with Miron Constantinescu, H. Mendelsohn, Ion Prica, and Lionel Markovici where he continued the work of the party while also struggling with bad health and difficult work conditions. Exactly what he did for the Party while in Lugoj, however, is not explained, a furtively constructed lacuna in his narrative. One is left to wonder why he might be reluctant to discuss his work during this period given the value that his “prison nucleus” pedigree might give to his application for Party membership. Rather than use this opportunity to present his impeccable credentials, however, he simply moves on to describe his personal suffering in prison. Eventually, he became too ill to work and, suspected of having contracted typhus, was sent to a hospital in Braşov. After two months of recovery he was transferred back to Lugoj where he remained until August 23, 1944 “with the beginning of the dawning of the sun of the working class.” He was released from prison the evening of August 25, 1944. The morning of August 26, “Comrade Miron (Constantinescu) met with me and gave me the directive that I needed to go to carry on the struggle especially in the Jiu Valley.” From August 27 to September 1 Nicolae traveled to the Jiu Valley and, on September 1, 1944, began working and agitating for the Party in a hand grenade factory in Vulcan. Here he worked with the Union Committee and helped to form a committee for the founding of a local Young Communist's Union (UTC), was an active member in the Miners' Union, and lead youth meetings in Lupeni, Vulcan, and Petroşani. In October 1944 he began working at the Vulcan textile plant and remained there in various capacities, including as a “worker artist,” until December 1950, when he was suspended due to the “disappearance” of some drive belts from a storeroom (although Nicolae claimed his job had nothing to do with controlling or maintaining inventories). He was fined and eventually performed various jobs at the Vulcan mine until he was given a position as the director of the Miners' Club in Vulcan (the post that he held at the time of this autobiography in 1953).

The difficulties facing the working-class aspirant to Party membership illustrates, in a significant way, the profound Cartesian dualism of the performance of class consciousness. Many experienced this as the seeming divide between Communist theory and practice. What I mean by Cartesian dualism here is the distinct separation of the mind and the body, and the even more significant skepticism and uncertainty that is tied to the body. Indeed, it is through the play of the mind-body duality that one can see the workings of verification in the Party. The body is seen as either iconic or deceptive depending upon the narrative context in which it is situated. When the writer of an autobiography writes about the self under bourgeois capitalism the body is viewed as iconic of class struggle. The suffering of the working-class person at the hands of the bourgeoisie becomes written on the body. The suffering of the body can be seen as proof of one's inner commitment to the proletarian cause; a reflection of the working-class self. On the other hand, when the writer narrates the self in the period after 1944, the Party views the body with profound skepticism. The body no longer maintains its powers as an iconic reflection of the committed working-class self. Rather, the body has the potential for concealing a conspiratorial, furtive self that might hold dormant the seeds of a counterrevolutionary self that would threaten the building of a communist society. As Halfin notes, “one who wished to explain his betrayal not in terms of his consciousness and will, which were expected to be pure at all times, had to blame his corruptible body.”²⁴

What makes this situation even more confusing, though, is that, for the Party, the body can be read as both the semiotic means of deception and concealment as well as the textual space for revealing the “true,” degenerate, counterrevolutionary nature of the opportunist's furtive self.²⁵ It is, then, for this reason that even the most apparently dedicated Party member might be accused of “counterrevolutionary deviances” for the most mundane mistake or “lack of vigilance.”

In a postscript to his autobiography, Iosif Nicolae returned to his jailing in 1941 and the treacherous Ion O. In 1950, he was called as a witness in Ion O.'s trial and conviction for “war crimes.” Nicolae ends this postscript by stating that in January 1953 he had made accusations against the former commissioners of the security forces “Serban and Motoc.” This return, in Nicolae's narrative, to his suffering at the hands of the former regime's security officials is meant to both cement his own deservedness for Party membership as well as build a bridge between his own past and the “prison nucleus” of the interwar and war years.

However, there is something that Iosif Nicolae is not telling us, and this emerges at the end of his autobiography. The most obvious omission and seeming contradiction in this narrative is why he did not attempt to join the Party until 1949. The return to his “prison nucleus” pedigree in the postscript is a significant rhetorical move meant to stave off traces of furtiveness in his self-presentation around this issue. But Nicolae knew he would not be able to avoid this issue, so, after writing the postscript, he drew a dark, dashed line across the page and under that began to frame his concerns about his application for Party membership, his reasons for writing this autobiography, and the fact that his application for Party membership in 1949 had been rejected. He writes:

Given his background—the fact that he was untouched by any fascist involvement and that he was connected to pre-1944 Party activism and the “prison nucleus” and the fact that he did not pose an internal political threat to other Party members—Iosif Nicolae would appear to make the perfect Party member. Not only could he produce a narrative that seemed to parallel that of many of the Party bosses at the time, but he could also illustrate his embodiment of Party activism. He was more than just an empty set of platitudes or negative statements seen so frequently in these autobiographies: “I have always supported the working class” or “I never supported the Legionnaire movement and I never was of the privileged landowning class.” Rather, Nicolae had suffered torture, threats, privation, and illness in prison for the Party, never once giving in to the temptations of becoming an informant. In other words, Nicolae, through his association with the “prison nucleus” during the Second World War, should have been in an ideal position to turn his autobiographical credentials into Party membership since his affiliation with the “prison Communists” should have meant that he was pure of mind and body and could not be seen as an opportunist.

One explanation for the Party's continued reluctance to embrace such a seemingly obvious and well-qualified candidate for membership is probably tied to Nicolae's delay in joining the Party in its recreated and institutionalized form immediately after the war. Indeed, there are few things that struck the verificare subcommittees as more repellant than an applicant who should have joined the Party immediately, but delayed, in the eyes of these subcommittees, to see which way the political winds would be blowing after the War. While it might seem counterintuitive to imagine that the Party was willing to embrace people who might have a somewhat questionable past over an aspirant with a perfect political pedigree, Halfin has found a similar trend in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. He points out that:

As Halfin goes on to say, the real problem for the person who should have embraced the Party but deliberately avoided it, was that “such applicants had a hard time describing their past as innocent.”²⁷

Nicolae certainly suffered from the inability to claim innocence or ignorance of the workings of the Party given his close connection to the heralded “prison nucleus” during the war. However, I would stress that his failings were not so much a sign of his actual life history experiences—whether he did or did not join the Party immediately—but, rather, his failings as an autobiographer. Nicolae fails to narrativize his life in a way that would allow him to illustrate his conversion to proletarian class consciousness, and this failure makes it impossible for him to construct a narrative coherence between his past and his present self. As I argued above, Nicolae has difficulty reconciling the special challenges facing the working-class autobiographer. He binds his narrative to a discourse that stresses his always-already proletarian identity and is incapable of building a coherent structure to bridge his pre-1944 life with his post-1944 self. In his final appeal to the Party verificare subcommittee, he makes this lack of a narrative coherence abundantly clear in the transition from a highly politically- and historically-charged story of his suffering under the bourgeois regime to an autocritical narrative that comes across as a pathetic attempt to throw himself on the mercy (or lack thereof) of the Party. Indeed, what one reads in his conclusion is really an emotional appeal, a self-degradation and self-immolation that has the tone of a peasant's appeal to a lord rather than the strong, resolute self-presentation of the revolutionary he had put forth throughout the beginning of his autobiography.

My goal in this paper has been to reconsider the ways in which working-class autobiographies written for Party membership in 1950s Romania reveal the ambiguous meaning of “the proletariat” during the early years of the regime. Part of the reason for the purges in the early 1950s emerged out of the desire of the Gheorghiu-Dej government to develop a sense of authentic ideological unity and cohesion among Party members. This led to a purge of Party member who might have been deemed opportunist. The bureaucratic mechanism used to initiate any purge was the verification process, which allowed the state to rationally reexamine and redefine a member's standing in the Party. Verification could also, as we saw with Iosif Nicolae, be used to deny membership to a newly-applying Party aspirant. Central to the process of verification was the writing of an autobiography, and, central to the narrative style of the successful autobiography was the construction of a “conversion narrative.” As I have stressed above, the obligatory nature of the conversion narrative in these autobiographies remained highly problematic for people who had been working class before 1944. People who had always-already considered themselves working-class found themselves awkwardly trying to recreate their life stories to both reflect a continuity with their past consciousness and to reflect a “conversion” to a present consciousness, even though they frequently saw past and present as the same. Even gifted working class writers like Iosif Nicolae found it challenging to make sense of their lives as a conversion to proletarian consciousness when they felt like they had always-already been working class.

Ultimately, rather than proposing a prototype for the working-class Party autobiography, I suggest that we examine these narratives through the multiple ways in which the writers approached the double bind in which they found themselves. Rather than considering the impact of state-directed norms for narrativizing one's life history, we might consider the ways in which writers were either able to circumvent or failed to circumvent the contradictions around what it meant to be proletarian and what it meant to be a member of the Party. Through the process of simultaneously revealing and concealing a furtive self-presentation, working-class people made sense of their lives in unexpected and frequently idiomatic ways.